["Your best title yet," a friend of mine declared. Well, certainly my most attention-getting. I'm afraid this post plays a peculiarly nasty Jedi mind trick on you, especially if you're a neo-Nazi or other Holocaust denier. But maybe not only if. In any case, my sensors detected a particularly strong uptick in Moldbug-hating among the "ethnic genetic interests" crowd, whose ire for my Semitic roots runs strong. Always trust content from nizkor.org! It's always easy to tell who's right on these controversial questions - you just have to look at who's frothing at the mouth.]

Western intellectuals spent two thousand years wondering what would have happened if Athens had won the Peloponnesian War. Might modern civilization, iPhones and all, have sprung directly from the society that created science, mathematics, literature and democracy? Was it the victory of the icy, militaristic Spartans over the cultured, humanistic Athenians that left the West waiting until the 1830s for its industrial revolution? If not for the Sicilian Expedition - would Caesar have had an iPhone?

Then we had the 20th century. And we found out what happens when Athens beats Sparta. Reader, you see it all around you. At a certain point the Thirty Tyrants don't seem so bad after all.

The truth, I think, is that by the time the European virtues split into the Athenian and Spartan virtues, the tragedy has already happened. Should we judge a society by the resolution on its iPhones? If so, the task is without interest. Like all reactionaries, I feel we should judge a society by the quality of its men and women - and better yet, its best men and women. Every few centuries in our history sees some new Rome, which always rises because of the virtue of its elite, and always collapses when that virtue is lost. And when we see Athenian virtues without Spartan, or Spartan without Athenian, we know that the two will fight and both are doomed.

The curious quality of the Anglo-German wars of the 20th century is that, while the democrats are clearly Athenian and the fascists clearly Spartan, the 20th-century Athenians are far more Spartan than their grandchildren, and the 20th-century Spartans far more Athenian than their own pathetic remnants. Hitler loved opera. Show me a neo-Nazi who loves opera - I'll show you a neo-Nazi in the AARP. And it goes without saying that Churchill is basically a fascist, at least as compared to David Cameron.

The point was driven home for me at Wilde Lake High School in 1988, where I found myself in an auditorium listening to a long, bathetic string of student awards. "Student-athlete of the year," as I recall, was a 300-pound all-state offensive lineman who'd racked up an incredible 1150 on his SATs. Why couldn't I be competing for this position? Being actually not bad at ping-pong, I was about as much of an athlete as he was a student.

Whereas in the 1500s we see men like the Admirable Crichton or the Earl of Oxford - both of whom are outliers, of course, but not exceptionally anomalous outliers. Both of whom are as Spartan as Otto Skorzeny and as Athenian as Leo Szilard. But, of course - no iPhones.

We still have Spartans. So did Honorius. If anything, it was his Athenians that sucked balls, and indeed you can't throw a stone these days without hitting some 21st-century Symmachus. Not a good omen. What would it take to heal this Athenian-Spartan divide? Can it even be done, or should we just consign tomorrow to God's mercy or the Huns'? No shortage of Huns, either.

But I digress. I was talking about Nazis. Since the Nazis were the Spartans, it's hard to find an eloquent Nazi. We want to know the Nazi mind, because nothing human is foreign to us. The communist mind, the democratic mind (but I repeat myself), springs out at us in great torrents of loquacity. Athens is never lacking in logos - the problem is filtering.

But the Spartan speaks only with his sword. Books cannot really capture him, yet we have nothing else. Still, since even the Third Reich is surprisingly Athenian when you get to know it, the problem is not unsolvable. Most 21st-century intellectuals have a favorite eloquent Nazi: Albert Speer.

There is much to be said for Speer's memoir, though it is not without its disingenuous moments, but the problem with it is that we never get to meet the Nazi Speer - the author, by the time he writes, has completely submitted (with or without internal reservation) to conquering liberalism. So what we read in Speer is a liberal perspective on the Third Reich. We can get this from many other places, even as a primary source, for despite the hard work of Judge Freisler our record is not short of July 20 memoirs - nor was Nazi Germany short of secret liberals. Indeed the Third Reich we know from secondary sources is largely rendered through their eyes.

And without German, I'm restricted to the very limited supply of Nazi writing translated into English. Reinhard Spitzy is certainly worth a look, but I have a new candidate for this position: Hans Fritzsche.

Unless someone else wrote his Sword in the Scales (English edition, 1953), Fritszche - a radio journalist and Goebbels protege, who sat in the dock with Goering and Hess, but was acquitted - is a real writer. He's also, as we'll see, a real Nazi. So I have nothing to do but step aside and let him speak. Chapter 13, "Can Such Things Be?" - complete:

To me the most tremendous point in the whole indictment lay in the massacre of the Jews. This was not a question of conflicting interpretation as was the subject of war-guilt, but of plain indisputable fact.

At first the evidence that several million Jews had been killed in Germany and German-occupied territory was submerged in the general flood of accusations about mass murders at hundreds of different places in which the total number of dead claimed by the Prosecution varied from five to eighteen million. Moreover, a number of the place-names mentioned by interrogators and prison officials as the scenes of these killings were soon shown to be incorrect; they spoke for instance of gas-chambers at Dachau, where, according to unimpeachable evidence, there had never been any. As a result of this sort of testimony a number of prisoners formed the impression that the whole charge was simply an exaggerated description of the pogroms which had been reported in 1941 from several places in German-occupied eastern Europe.

I myself called to mind the principle enunciated by enemy publicists even before 1939 as the essence of war propaganda: the enemy must be portrayed as a monster without relieving features. And I could not help thinking of the legend of children's severed hands in the first World War, while at the same time I remembered the replies given by the German information centres to whom I had submitted all current reports of atrocities, and who had disputed their accuracy in no uncertain fashion.

Were then the present apparently overwhelming charges of mass murder only a continuation of Allied propaganda? The detailed verbal statements by prosecuting counsel of alleged crimes, which often displayed a surprising ignorance of German conditions, were not convincing; and many of the documents produced in their support seemed equally without foundation. Such documents often showed little more than that the same facts can be very differently described, and the same words very differently interpreted.

Then suddenly, surprisingly, came a change of tactics. We found ourselves watching a documentary film.

The hall was darkened and a row of little lamps on the edge of the dock lit up our faces from below so that Dr. Gilbert, the psychologist, who had planted himself in front, was in a good position to watch our reactions. In the face of these preparations many of the prisoners deliberately assumed blank expressions; some turned their backs on the screen, and Dr. Schacht remarked that he himself had been in a concentration camp and needed no film to tell him what it was like. Others however never took their eyes off the ghastly scenes now displayed before us.

One and all we were at first profoundly sceptical as to the authenticity of the pictures, though the rows upon rows of pitiful living skeletons reminded me of my fellow sufferers in the Lubianka. The bales of human hair aroused immediate doubts in our minds as to their origin, and those of us who were watching gazed searchingly at the successive heaps of corpses in an endeavour to light on a clue as to when and where these camera shots could have been taken.

In the end, however, all our resolve to be coolly critical gave way to sheer elementary pity for these tortured creatures. No matter where the pictures had been made, no one could doubt that they were pictures of human beings, men, women, children, who had once lived and breathed, loved and hoped, and had been foully done to death. Did it matter what language those lips had spoken before they were silenced for ever, what thoughts were housed in that brain before it was crushed to pieces? The poor body, so soon to be reduced to ashes, had once lain beneath a mother's heart.

The majority of us, who had looked for some cunning ulterior motive behind this film display, were shaken to the depths. But out of our very emotion there arose once more the persistent question: might not this documentary show more than anything else simply be a new aspect of the blind murderous frenzy of war, of those horrors which in a single generation have grown from the soldiers who fell in Flanders to the women and children done to death in Dresden? Are not these frightful forms of death the work of primitive forces which man himself has unleashed and which have passed beyond his control? Or are they the outcome of individual cruelty and a deliberate will to destroy? The film showed the most hideous defilement of God's image; was that defilement due to some power outside man, or to a brutal and cynical human purpose? Sickened though we were, this question tormented us as we marched back to our cells.

Almost immediately two of the psychologists came in. I begged them to leave me alone; they went away and returned with a doctor who offered me sedatives to help me sleep; I refused them. Confronted with such problems as this day had brought forth, it would have been impossible to take refuge in unconsciousness; I had to face them and come to terms with them.

Some of us did so to the best of our ability. Having no written information at our disposal, we argued among ourselves, basing our discussions on personal observations, conjecture, and posterior inferences. Finally, as a result of these discussions, we came to the conclusion that these harrowing pictures would probably not bear minute investigation; too many extraneous scenes, too many coincidences, appeared to have been incorporated in them so as to enhance their general effect. Moreover, even if the film as a whole did present an alarming image of what had really happened, it still did not constitute proof of any one of the particular mass murders which the Prosecution declared had taken place.

But this proof was furnished verbally by two witnesses, Ohlendorf and Höss, before whose testimony our scepticism (already shaken) about the accuracy of this part of the indictment gave way completely. They established beyond doubt that a systematic campaign of murder had been launched against the Jews. Ohlendorf described how tens of thousands in East Germany -- men, women, and children -- had been shot, one by one, by specially detailed squads; while Höss admitted having studied the arrangements made by the German Commissioner Wirth at Treblinka (a camp in Poland) so as to be able to reproduce them on a larger scale at Birkenau near Auschwitz, where by means of a vast industrially-organized human slaughter-house the number of slain ran into hundreds of thousands. There was nothing to indicate that either of these witnesses was telling anything but the stark, hideous truth; nothing that I heard at any time was calculated to shake their evidence.

Their statements naturally produced a tremendous effect in the dock. Nobody questioned the honesty of their evidence, but some of the most important details were called into question, and there were heated arguments both about the instigators of the massacres and the various circumstances attendant on them.

The Prosecution now furnished us with stacks of documentary material and produced whole groups of witnesses. There was evidence of atrocities committed on non-Jewish civilians in concentration camps, many of which were conclusively proved to have been carried out on lines similar to those established for the murders of Jews. Many of the witnesses of these events were obviously given to exaggeration and generalization, but there were those whom it was impossible to doubt, and their testimony was entirely sufficient.

These were followed by charges in connection with the treatment of foreign workers in Germany concerning which, in my opinion, the Prosecution were under a complete misapprehension; a point of view which was later justified by Sauckel's examination.

Next came the problem of war-guilt, and I am bound to say that the material submitted by the Prosecution under this head made a deep impression on me, for it contradicted my earlier impression about the aims of the German Government. All the evidence submitted, however, disclosed only the merest fraction of the many-sided developments which led up to the second World War.

The documents furnished by the Allies were barely sufficient for the demands of political propaganda, let alone all the manifold requirements of a trial which was admittedly of supreme historical importance. The historian will have to seek further information, and at present it is only in America that the raw material is to be found for a really unbiased study of the origins of the First World War and the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles, a treaty which did not satisfy the victor, and caused the masses of the vanquished to plunge from one radical extreme to another. Moreover, such an investigation would be an essential preliminary for any analysis of the unrest that permeated central Europe in the '20s and '30s, and culminated in the second great conflagration.

The contention that, after a certain date, Hitler was bent on war with Poland, struck us as forced; unquestionably he did not want a simultaneous conflict with the West. Whether he would have provoked such a conflict later, or whether he simply would have put forward claims to more territory and a suzerainty over the western powers, remained one of the most hotly disputed points in the whole of the trial. Certainly none of the evidence showed any conclusive proof that he even entertained a wish to attack the American hemisphere.

But Hitler's determination to smash the Soviet Union was proved. There is no doubt that he aimed at making the Russo-Ukrainian region a political province of a greater Reich; but, on the other hand, the supremely important question as to when, and for what reason, he made up his mind to launch the colossal attack at the moment he did remains open.

Any comments that I was able to make from my own knowledge on the evidence furnished by the Prosecution I wrote down afterwards in the quietness of my cell. These notes [published but only in German - MM] were made without the help of any written material, which was of course in one way a disadvantage, but on the other hand enhanced their value as an unprompted personal account, devoid of the distorting influence that other testimony, constantly referred to, often exerts on such documents. First my own conscience, and then the Prosecution and the Bench, submitted these notes to a very careful scrutiny.

When, after a year in Nuremberg prison, I came to testify in my own defence, and found the searchlight of public opinion focused on me, I was able because of this preparation to answer every question put to me without hesitation. Certain journalists, observing that I showed no signs of being at a loss for the right word (as was usually, and very naturally, the case with prisoners), accused me of lack of feeling, and reported that I had profited by the total breakdown of my former world to adopt a coldly intellectual position, and so build up the best possible personal defence of myself. The truth was that nothing the Prosecution could do in the matter of cross-examination could compare with the gruelling self-questioning which had preceded it. All that I produced in court were the burnt-out ashes of what had once been red-hot lava.

Do you find this treatment enlightening, or self-serving, or a bit of both? It is certainly historically accurate, so far as the facts go. A few pages later, Fritzsche writes:

The Prosecution at Nuremberg had submitted to Bach [Bach-Zelewski] an alleged confession of Peiper's, according to which Himmler -- in the presence of Peiper and others, including Bach -- had drawn up a plan by which, under cover of the military campaign, forty million Slavs were to be slaughtered. At this point Bach -- as he now averred -- turned indignantly to the Prosecution's interrogator and declared that Himmler had spoken of killing "only" thirty millions. In conclusion Bach told my informant that after this admission, he could no longer deny the fact of the proposal, and had to give his evidence accordingly.

Now, at last, we were getting near to the heart of the matter, and the former S.S. Leader from Himmler's staff was able to put the whole story together. He remembered indeed the very occurrence on which it was founded. One evening early in 1941 Himmler and some of his cronies were sitting round the fire in the Wewelsburg; in addition to Bach and Peiper there were present Heydrich, Daluege, Obergrüppenführer Wolff, and Rauter, one of the Gestapo chiefs in Holland. Himmler spoke of an impending war in the east, which, he said, was unavoidable, the only question being when it would start and who would fire the first shot. He warned the company of the difficulty of the coming conflict and said in effect: "Germany is technically, Russia numerically, superior. The Soviet has unlimited power over its citizens and will sacrifice them without compunction: should Germany allow herself to be similarly tempted she will incur instead of strategical victory biological defeat." Later in the evening, Himmler computed the possible casualties on both sides, and estimated that in view of their determination to resist, and taking into account epidemics and famine, the Russians' losses might total anything up to thirty million.

What a revelation! Himmler's calculations of the enormous losses caused by military action and the general results of war were of course something very different from a deliberate and diabolical campaign of murder. I was reminded of Clemenceau's "vingt millions de trop" -- an expression which had been exploited by our German propaganda. But surely we had never distorted that remark beyond the bounds of reason, as this not dissimilar calculation of Himmler's had been distorted! I could see at last how, in the hands of a determined Prosecution, Himmler's thirty million hypothetical casualties had become metamorphosed into thirty million victims of a premeditated murder.

Bach was not the type of man to avoid this kind of thing. His was the sort of mind peculiarly susceptible to the latest impressions it had received, and his outlook, formerly imbued with Nazi ideas, now bore the clear impress of Allied propaganda. This example of a particular piece of testimony, with its background and its sequel, might be cited as how it is possible to shift the emphasis of evidence from one point to another, and so alter its whole bearing and significance.

Sometimes, however, this "shifted emphasis" resulted quite simply from the overwhelming pressure of current public opinion; and for this I was to some degree prepared by my interviews with various leading figures in Berlin and Moscow, and later at Nuremberg, which had made me realise how much a human being's point of view depends on the political climate he finds himself in.

It seems to me as though people can only manage to see things at all clearly when some political wind or other is blowing from behind them; if they turn against it, it blows directly into their eyes, and they become blinded. My first reaction to this discovery was a feeling of profound contempt for my fellows; a feeling which, on closer examination, turned out to be quite unjustified.

For our views about the world we live in are in truth like so many flags, kept flying by the prevailing current of opinion. If the wind is strong enough, they will continue to display their colours in the same direction -- until the weather changes. In the dock I used often to discuss with Speer and Schirach the question of maintaining a happy medium between a too inflexible and a too impressionable political outlook; and we came to the opinion that many of the sufferings of our nation could be traced back to this one question, in which politics, morals, intellect and character all play their separate parts.

Fritzsche, though acquitted at Nuremberg, was retried by a West German court and released in 1950 only to die of cancer. A page translated from German notes:

To his own surprise, it did manage Fritzsche to portray themselves as insignificant before the Nuremberg Tribunal and subject to instructions. He could not repeat this success in the subsequent denazification procedures. The German justice saw him as a leading propagandists, who had hidden at his career's sake, the criminal side of National Socialism. Although Fritzsche was not a fanatical Nazi, but was a loud both staunch supporters of the Nazi party and more efficient. According to tribunal he was a "deceiver" responsible for the prolongation of the war and was therefore sentenced to nine years in labor camp in 1947. For this he was dismissed in 1950. Had he not died shortly afterwards, he could have taken a similar role as a witness, as later, Albert Speer. He "would have it, perhaps even leave a nice impression," said Bonacker.

Indeed. And in case we haven't heard enough Nazi perspectives on the Holocaust, Fritzsche also links us to the very interesting testimony of SS Judge George Konrad Morgen (who came out with a clean enough sheet to later practice law in West Germany):

Q. Will you state your full name, please?

A. Georg Konrad Morgen.

Q. Will you repeat this oath after me:

I swear by God, the Almighty and Omniscient, that I will speak the pure truth and will withhold and add nothing.

(The witness repeated the oath.)

THE PRESIDENT: You may sit down.

DIRECT EXAMINATION BY DR. PELCKMANN:

Q. Witness, because of the significance of your testimony, I will first ask you in detail about yourself. Were you an SS judge of the Reserve?

A. Yes.

Q. Please speak slowly and wait a little after every question.

What training did you have?

A. I studied law at the Universities of Frankfurt on the Main, Rome, Berlin f at the "Academie de Droit International" at the Hague and the "Institute for World Economy and Ocean Traffic" in Kiel. I passed the first, the senior law examination. Before the war I was a judge at the Landgericht in Stettin.

Q. Were you a specialist in criminology and in criminal law?

A. No, I had specialized in International Law, but later, during the war, when I had to deal with criminal matters and penal law, I did special work in that field.

Q. How did you come to the SS?

A. I was drafted compulsorily into the General SS. In 1933, I belonged to the Reich Board for Youth Training, whose group of students was taken over as a body. I was drafted at the beginning of the war into the Waffen SS.

Q. What rank did you have there?

A. In the General SS I was Staffelanwarter and SS Rottenfuehrer. In the Waffen SS I was latterly Sturmbannfuehrer of the Reserve.

Q. What example can you give that you did not believe you were joining conspiracy when you joined the SS. Very briefly, please.

A. In 1936 I published a book on War Propaganda and the Prevention of War. This book, at a time when war was threatening, showed ways and means to prevent war and the incitement of nation against nation. The book was examined by the Party and published. Therefore, I could not suppose that the SS and the policy of the Reich Government were directed towards war.

Q. How did you come to the investigations in the concentration camps?

A. At the order of the Reichsfuehrer SS, because of my special abilities in criminology, I was detailed by the SS Judicial Department to the Reich Criminal Police Office in Berlin, which was equivalent to a transfer. Shortly after I arrived there, I was given an assignment to investigate a case of corruption in Weimar. The accused was a member of the concentration camp of Weimar-Buchenwald. The investigations soon led to the person of the former commandant, Koch, and many of his subordinates, and in addition affected a number of other concentration camps. As those investigations became more extensive, I received full authority from the Reichsfuehrer SS to engage generally in such investigations in concentration camps.

Q. Why was a special power of attorney from the Reichsfuehrer necessary?

A. For the guards of the concentration camps, the SS and Police Courts were competent; that is, in each case the local Court in whose district the concentration camp was located. For that reason, because of the limited jurisdiction of its judge, the Court was not able to act outside its own district. In these investigations and their extensive ramifications it was important to be able to work in various districts. In addition, it was necessary to use specialists in criminal investigation, in other words, the criminal police. The criminal police, however, could not carry on any investigation directly among the troops, and only by combining juridical and criminal police activities was it possible to clear this up, and for this purpose I was given this special power of attorney by the Reichsfuehrer.

Q. Now, how extensive did these investigations become? You can be brief because the witness Reinecke answered this point in part.

Q. How many cases did you investigate? How many sentences were passed? How many death sentences?

A. I investigated about 800 cases, or rather, about 800 documents, and one document would affect several cases. About 200 were tried during my activity. Five concentration camp commandants were arrested by me personally. Two were shot after being tried.

Q. You caused them to be shot?

A. Yes. Apart from the commandants, there were numerous other death sentences against Fuehrers and Unterfuehrers.

Q. Did you have any opportunity of visiting and seeing for yourself the conditions inside concentration camps?

A. Yes, because I had authority to visit concentration camps myself. Only a very few persons had this permission. Before beginning an investigation, I examined the concentration camp in question in all its details, seeing especially those arrangements which seemed particularly important to me. I visited them repeatedly and thoroughly. I paid surprise visits. I was working mostly in Buchenwald itself for eight months. I lived there. I was in Dachau for one or two months.

Q. As so many visitors to concentration camps say they were deceived, do you consider it possible that you, too, were a victim of such deception?

A. As I have already pointed out, I was not a mere visitor to a concentration camp. I had settled down there for a long residence, I might almost say I established myself there. It is really impossible to be deceived for such a long time. In addition, the commissions from the Reich Department of Criminal Police worked under my instructions, and I placed them directly in the concentration camps themselves. I do not mean to say that, in spite of these very intensive efforts, I was able to learn of all the crimes, but I believe that there was no deception in regard to what I did learn.

Q. Did you gain the impression, and at what time, that the concentration camps were places for the extermination of human beings?

A. I did not gain this impression. A concentration camp is not a place for the extermination of human beings. I must say that my first visit to a concentration camp, namely Weimar-Buchenwald, was a great surprise to me. The camp was on wooded heights, with a wonderful view. The installations were clean and freshly painted. There were grass and flowers. The prisoners were healthy, normally fed, sun-tanned, working -

THE PRESIDENT: When are you speaking of? When are you speaking of?

A. I am speaking of the beginning of my investigations in July, 1943.

Q. What crimes - you may continue - please, be more brief.

A. The installations of the camp were in good order, especially the hospital. The camp authorities, under the Commandant Diester, aimed at providing the prisoners with an existence worthy: of human beings. They had regular mail service. They had a large camp library, even with foreign books. They had variety shows, motion pictures, sporting events. They even had a brothel. Nearly all the other concentration camps were similar to Buchenwald.

THE PRESIDENT: What was it they even had?

A. A brothel.

Q. What crimes did you learn about?

A. As I said before, the investigations were based on a suspicion of corrupt practices. In time, however, I was obliged to come to the conclusion that besides those crimes, killings had also occurred.

Q. How did you reach the suspicion that killings had occurred?

A. I learned that the starting-point was the assignment of Jews to the camps after "Action 38." I had to learn all possible facts about this action, and in doing so I was obliged to notice that the majority of prisoners of whom it could be assumed that they might know something about these cases, had died.

This peculiar frequency of killings was noticeable - I noticed it - because other prisoners who were not in any key positions remained in Buchenwald for years in the best of health, and were still there, so that it was rather remarkable that it was just certain prisoners who could have been witnesses who had died. I thereupon examined the files concerning these deceased prisoners.

The files themselves did not then give cause to suspect illegal killings. The dates of the deaths were years apart, and the different causes of death were always given. But I noticed that the majority of these deceased prisoners, shortly before their death, had been put into the camp hospital or were in the detention quarters.

This first aroused my suspicion that in these two places murders of prisoners might possibly have occurred. Thereupon I appointed a special official, whose sole task was to investigate the suspicious circumstances, and rumours which were circulating in the detention quarters, the so-called "Bunker," regarding the killing of prisoners. He was a very zealous and able criminal official, but he had to report again and again that he had not found the least confirmation of this suspicion of mine.

After two weeks of completely unsuccessful activity, the criminal official refused to continue his task and asked me ironically whether I myself believed that such, rumours of illegal killing of prisoners could be true. Only by accident, much later, was I put on the trail. I noticed that in the case of certain prisoners, in the books of the Kommandantur prison, and in the hospital books, they had been recorded in both books at the same time. In the prison book, for example, it said, "Date of release, 9th May, 12 o'clock." In the hospital register, "Patient died 9th May, 9.15 a.m."

I said to myself, this prisoner cannot be in the Kommandantur Prison and at the same time a patient in the hospital. False entries must have been made here. I therefore concentrated my efforts on this and I succeeded in finding out about this system, for it was a system under Kommandant Koch.

The prisoners were taken to a secret place and were killed there, mostly in a cell of the Kommandantur prison, and sick reports and death certificates were prepared for the files. They were made out so cleverly that any unsuspecting reader of the documents would get the impression that the prisoner concerned had actually been treated and had died of the serious illness which was indicated.

Q. Then what did you do after learning of these facts?

A. I found out that the medical officer at Buchenwald, SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Dr. Hoven, was principally responsible and I had him arrested. I informed my investigating commission of these cunning forgeries and directed their particular attention to investigate systematically the concentration camps which we visited and to ascertain whether such murders had also been committed in other concentration camps. We satisfied ourselves at the time of the investigation, and I am speaking of the second half of 1942, that in the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Dachau no such killings occurred, as far as it was humanly possible to judge. In the other concentration camps, however, such cases were found. The persons believed to be guilty were accused, arrested and charged.

Q. Why was this not done earlier?

A. I have already said that these deceptive measures were so cunningly contrived that it was not possible to discover them earlier. Above all, there, was no possibility of clearing up the matter, besides these things were always done without witnesses. These cases had to be investigated by the SS Courts and they were investigated, for every unnatural death of a prisoner was reported by teletype to the central agency. In addition, the specially sworn-in Court officer who was in the camp had to go immediately to the place of the occurrences to question the witnesses; sketches and photographs had to be made of the scene and it was a regulation that an autopsy had to take place in every such case of unnatural death.

Those reports of unnatural deaths, or of deaths suspected of being unnatural, were sent regularly to the SS and Police Court; but as I have already said, these reports were so cunningly contrived and the files were in such good order that even an expert could not have suspected an illegal killing. Of course, frequently proceedings were taken against members of the concentration camp, some followed by sentences, even death sentences. But these deaths appeared to occur at quite a normal rate.

If nothing at all had been reported to the SS Courts from the concentration camps, it would of course have seemed suspicious, just as it would also have been suspicious if too many such reports had been made to us. But it was a normal average and one could have no suspicion that the concentration camps were a hotbed of such dangerous crimes. It was through my investigation, which as I said was caused by accident, that we received our first insight into the true state of affairs.

Q. How did you come on to the track of mass killings? You have just spoken of individual killings.

A. I found traces of mass killings also by accident. At the end of 1943, I discovered two trails at the same time, one leading to Lublin and the other to Auschwitz.

Q. Please describe the Lublin trail first.

A. One day I received a report from the Commandant of the Security Police in Lublin. He reported that in a Jewish labour camp in his district a Jewish wedding had taken place. There had been 1,100 invited guests at this wedding.

As I said, 1,100 guests participated in this Jewish wedding. What followed was described as quite extraordinary owing to the gluttonous consumption of food and alcoholic drinks. With these Jews were members of the camp guard, that is to say some SS men or other, who took part in this function. This report only came into my hands in a roundabout way, some months later, as the Commandant of the Security Police suspected that the circumstances indicated that some criminal acts had occurred.

This was my impression as well, and I thought that this report would give me an indication of another big case of criminal corruption. With this intention, I went to Lublin and I went to the Security Police there, but all they would tell me was that the events were supposed to have happened at a camp of the "Deutsche Ausrustungswerke." But nothing was known there. I was told it might possibly be a rather peculiar and "opaque" (this was the actual term used) camp in the vicinity of Lublin. I found out the camp and the commandant, who was Kriminalkommissar Wirth.

I asked Wirth whether this report was true and what it meant. To my great astonishment, Wirth admitted it. I asked him why he permitted members of his command to do such things and Wirth then revealed to me that on the Fuehrer's order he had to carry out the extermination of Jews.

Q. Please go on, witness, with what you did.

A. I asked Wirth what this had to do with the Jewish wedding. Then, Wirth described the method by which he carried out the extermination of Jews and he said something like this: "One has to fight the Jews with their own weapons, and one has to cheat them."

Wirth built up an enormous deceptive manoeuvre. He first selected Jews who would, he thought, serve as column leaders, then these Jews brought along other Jews, who worked under them. With those smaller or medium-sized detachments of Jews, he began to build up the extermination camps. He extended this staff, and with them, Wirth himself carried out the extermination.

Wirth said that he had four extermination camps, and that about 5,000 Jews were working at the extermination of Jews and the seizure of Jewish property. In order to win Jews for this business of extermination and plundering of their brethren of race and creed, Wirth gave them every freedom and, so to speak, gave them a financial interest in the spoliation of the dead victims. As a result of this attitude, this extraordinary Jewish wedding had come about.

Then I asked Wirth how he killed Jews with these Jewish agents of his. Wirth described the whole procedure that went off like a film every time. The extermination camps were in the East of the Government General, in big forests or uninhabited waste lands. They were built up like a Potemkin village. The people arriving there had the impression of entering a city or a township. The train drove into what looked like a railroad station. The escorts and the train personnel then left the area. Then the cars were opened and the Jews got out.

They were surrounded by these Jewish labour detachments, and Kriminalkommissar Wirth or one of his representatives made a speech. He said: "Jews, you were brought here to be resettled, but before we organize this future Jewish State, you must of course learn how to work. You must learn a new occupation. You will be taught that here. Our routine here is, first, everyone must take off his clothes so that your clothing can be disinfected and you can have a bath so that no epidemics will be brought into the camp."

After he had found such calming words for his victims, they started on the road to death. Men and women were separated. At the first place, one had to give his hat; at the next one, his coat, collar, shirt, down to his shoes and socks. These places were set up like check-rooms, and the person was given a check at each one so that the people believed that they would get their things back. The other Jews had to receive the things and hurry up the new arrivals so that they would not have time to think. The whole thing was like an assembly line. At the last stop they reached a big room, and were told that this was the bath. When the last one was in, the doors were shut and the gas was let into the room.

As soon as death taken place in, the ventilators were started. When the air could be breathed again, the doors were opened, and the Jewish workers removed the bodies. By means of a special process which Wirth had invented, they were burned in the open air without the use of fuel.

Q. Was Wirth a member of the SS?

A. No, he was a Kriminalkommissar in Stuttgart.

Q. Did you ask Wirth how he arrived at this devilish system?

A. When Wirth took over the extermination of the Jews, he was already specialist in mass destruction of human beings. He had previously carried out the task of getting rid of the incurably insane. On behalf of the Fuehrer himself, whose order was transmitted through the Chancellery of the Fuehrer, he had, at the beginning of the war, set up a detachment for this purpose, probably composed of a few officials of his, I believe, the remainder being agents and spies of the criminal police.

Wirth very vividly described how he went about carrying out this assignment. He received no aid, no instructions, but had to do it all by himself. He was only given an old, empty institution in Brandenburg. There he undertook his first experiments. After much consideration and many individual experiments, he evolved his later system, and then this system was used on a large scale to exterminate the insane.

A commission of doctors previously investigated the files, and those insane who were considered to be incurable were put on a separate list. Then the institution one day was told to send these patients to another institution. From this institution the patient was transferred again, often more than once. Finally he came to Wirth's institution. There he was killed by gas and cremated.

This system which deceived the institutions and made them unknowing accomplices, this system which enabled him with very few assistants to exterminate large numbers of people, this system Wirth now employed with a few alterations and improvements for the extermination of Jews. He was also given the assignment by the Fuehrer's Chancellery to exterminate the Jews.

Q. The statements which Wirth made to you must have surpassed human imagination. Did you immediately believe Wirth?

A. At first Wirth's description seemed completely fantastic to me, but in Lublin I saw one of his camps. It was a camp which collected the property or part of the property of his victims. From the quantity - there were an enormous number of watches piled up - I had to realize that something frightful was going on here. I was shown the valuables. I can say that I never saw so much money at one time, especially foreign money - all kinds of coins, from all over the world. In addition, there were a gold-smelting furnace and really prodigious bars of gold.

I also saw that the headquarters from which Wirth directed his operations was very small and inconspicuous. He had only three or four people working there for him. I spoke to them too.

I saw and watched his couriers arrive. They actually came from Berlin, Tiergarten Strasse, the Fuehrer's Chancellery, and went back there. I investigated Wirth's mail, and I found in it confirmation of all this.

Of course, I could not do or see all this on this first visit. I was there frequently. I pursued Wirth up to his death...

"Q: You caused them to be shot? A: Yes." I mean, the man is a playa. Who, in 2011, causes anyone to be shot? At best we execute them with a joystick. We came, we saw, he died!

It's really not entirely clear to me that the rest of human history will, like Judge Morgen, find the 20th century even credible. But this indeed is how it was. I hope I've done my part to make the Holocaust seem a little more like the real event it was, not the screenplay legend it's become. Perhaps the Elders of Zion will be pleased.

I recall Moldbug writing on a previous occasion that self-serving Universalist history is effected with distortions, in preference to outright lies. A piece like this provides a superb illustration of that, I feel.

None of this history is hidden from view. Any scholar can find these sources in plain sight. The trickery of Universalism is to have acquired for itself a sufficiently pacified and dumbed-down populace that few in the intellectual caste would ever look to such materials, before forming their judgements about what happened in the 20th century.

"In terms of the fostering of culture and the forming of good taste and character, liberal-democratism has been so great a failure that it is believed by most to have been a great success."

I would amend this to state:

"In terms of the miseducation, moral destruction and mass ethnic replacement of its own populations to its adaptive advantage, Universalism's success has been so great that it has sown the seeds of its failure".

Well, well...I have been living in France for 30 years now.In France, we have not really been able to open up the Second World War yet, understand me, we have not been able to get down to its most potent lessons, FOR IDEOLOGICAL REASONS.Because we are still (and the entire Western world, while we are at it...) tributary to the ideology that made the Second World War possible, and more and more tributary every breath we breathe these days, moreover.Think of those CONCENTRATION/extermination camps as an enormous industrial, rationalized EXPERIMENT secreted by the system itself, for the benefit of the masses.All those words count. "Systems" and "masses" in place of living, breathing men and women.You are forgetting the dual roots of our "democratic" heritage : one from Athens, but then Athens was not really democratic in OUR sense of the word. It tolerated its elite. Its elite were.. ITS CITIZENS (no women or slaves there...)On the other hand, Paulinian Christianity will give a big PUSH to democracy with the "in Christ there is no East nor West, in HIm no North nor South, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth". Does THAT sound like a project for the masses or not ?? A little.. TOTALITARIAN DEAL, there ? (With the best of intentions, of course.)It certainly does, in my book.By the way... Fritsche sounds like an entirely.. NORMAL person. My 1920's born Daddy could have talked like that. Think about it... you or I, IN THE RIGHT CIRCUMSTANCES could talk that way too. Are we potential "Nazi" war criminals ?Or is our "normal" (!!!) world so watered down, so finger pointing, so DOMESTICATED that violence in any form is unthinkable for us ?For fun, check out "Macbeth", by William.Nothing like THAT play to get seriously depressed about the human condition, and convinced that life must be lived one day at a time in order to be fully enjoyed in the flesh. Not thrown away under the temptation of future promises and glories, no matter how heady they may be...In the 1600's, "things" were already heading this way.That's why the CONCENTRATION of the new technologies is a great guarantee that a new and improved industrial experiment is just waiting for us.Gotta scale down our TOYS, friends, gotta scale them down...

Wait, I'm confused. So, a tiny part of the Spartan Nazis set up concentration camps, which were, overall, quite humane places, with brothels and HBO, but then a madman sociopath, who wasn't even in the SS, used some Jews to exterminate some other Jews in one of these camps, a regrettable aberration, but quite within the framework of the first half of the twentieth century? And the whole thing was sort of incidental to the war as a whole, where the Americans were at fault?

I can imagine a triumphant Athens putting the Sicilian commandant of the rock quarries on trial and the latter defending himself along similar lines-overall, the Athenian prisoners were treated well, with some unfortunate excesses. Or NKVD general Nikishov discussing the great recreational opportunities available in Vorkuta and Magadan; sure, a camp commandant or two, driven by greed, permitted some unpleasant events to take place, but as soon as these excesses came to light, the guilty were punished and the issues addressed...

Moldbug posts dating from the inception of the blog to early in 2010 are archived here. However, because I find reading online to be a sub-optimal means of slogging through Moldbug's writings, I have copied the posts into themed PDF and .azw (kindle) files.

There may be small errors in these (I haven't read through all of them yet). Also pictures and links are missing (not that Mencius includes many pictures!)

Nonetheless in case anyone else might find these useful, here is a link to download a zip file containing 20 pdf and .azw documents which incorporate all of the substantial posts that are archived on the "Moldbuggery" site:

How did a nasty bit of wartime atrocity-propaganda come to permeate Western consciousness, as THE defining event of history—the point to which all prior history naturally leads, and from which all subsequent history flows; and such that study after study, analysis after analysis, rehashing after rehashing—from the most erudite-scholarly to the pulpiest of fiction*—is still published examining it, 70 years after the events allegedly occurred?

(*—It’s all essentially a big fiction, of course. The core of the narrative is fictitious, and has been proven so again and again. New research is still being published today. See, e.g., Sobibor: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality).

(2) A very good quick Overview of the Holocaust Myth is the conclusion (chap.16) to a little book entitled The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes. The book is truly fascinating in its own right, an in-depth “literary analysis” of the Myth. Highly recommended are chapter-1 (a kind of extended abstract) and chapter-3 (exploration of the deep origins of a ‘fear of showers and disinfection’ meme in the Ostjude consciousness going back many decades, the apparent germinal seed of the Myth).

> sure, a camp commandant or two, driven by greed, permitted some unpleasant events to take place, but as soon as these excesses came to light

To me, overall, he doesn't really suggest that ; after all (in contrast to eg, USG claims about Abu Ghraib), he says the orders were from the Chancellery - or is that, rather, a claim of Wirth's which he himself doubts? I don't understand why a few investigatees were executed if orders came from the top.

IMO this is a fairly pertinent question for judging these testaments. After all, organisms consist of a water gel, at least in life or at time of death. I can't imagine how you could possibly burn them without fuel, unless they are somehow dessicated first.

"The 'wick effect' hypothesis suggests that a small external flame source, such as a burning cigarette, chars the clothing of the victim at a location, splitting the skin and releasing subcutaneous fat, which is in turn absorbed into the burned clothing, acting as a wick. This combustion can continue for as long as the fuel is available. This hypothesis has been successfully tested with animal tissue (pig) and is consistent with evidence recovered from cases of human combustion. The human body typically has enough stored energy in fat and other chemical stores to fully combust the body; even lean people have several pounds of fat in their tissues. This fat, once heated by the burning clothing, wicks into the clothing much as candle wax (which was originally made of animal fat) wicks into a lit candle wick to provide the fuel needed to keep the wick burning."

GM-I read Ernst Von Salomon's book where he talks about his moment of clarity watching human waste dripping from packed cattle cars at a railroad yard. And he wasn't even a party member. That kind of shit gets out-people talk. It would have been difficult to note the disappearance of the Jews and fail to connect the dots. Those who didn't know didn't want to know.

RS-I suspect that the partaigenossen were executed for the same reasons that Ezhov's NKVD was purged by Beria for abusing physical means of interrogation, forcing suspects to confess, etc. It's like the purges in Casino-Nicky and his brother didn't REALLY get buried alive for excessive brutality. These comradely disagreements happen-a denunciation here, a missed kickback there...

Thing is, if you could completely cremate a body in a consistent manner without fuel, this would be very useful knowledge. I would be surprised that the man who figured out how to do it was a 20th c. Nazi flunky.

I have an open mind, and I realize that the proprietors of our current historiography are seriously fucked up, but this is a lot to swallow. Offer me the gentlest introduction you know of, please. Thanks.

Every few centuries in our history sees some new Rome, which always rises because of the virtue of its elite, and always collapses when that virtue is lost.

Think about the fall of Rome or Southern Confederacy:

Slaves.

In both cases, the elite decided they could do without the labor of the yeoman class and imported slaves to reduce labor costs. In the case of the South, a great many of the Yeomen could and did migrate west where there was uncultivated land while others of an independent bent had to find land by fleeing to the hills—quite literally—to become despised by the elites as “white trash” or “hillbillies”.

The driver of this is “economic rent”.

Think about it like this: If you own land, the larger the economy becomes the more demand there is for your land. So you have an incentive to import more and more people—that is unless you are in the labor market! If you are in the labor market, as are most yeomen, you must balance the increase in value of your land (whose value is dominated by its provision of life to your family anyway—so you can’t really think of selling it) against the prices you can get for your labor.

If the value that falls on assets from increasing economic activity is not taxed away and redistributed to the posterity of the founders, a welfare queen elite will arise that thinks it is entitled to the benefits of civilization, and the rest of the population, who were intended as the beneficiaries of the nation by its founders, are increasingly forced to compete with imported slave labor until they are forced to sell their subsistence properties and then go into debt slavery.

The invading peoples will, of course, complain loudly about being enslaved — but the punishment will be handed out to the populus for the crime of being of the same ethnicity as the elite — while the elite will absolve themselves of guilt by surrounding themselves with foreign sycophants.

Denying the Holocaust is like denying or not believing in Christianity.

You may or may not believe Jesus actually existed. If you believe he did exist and was crucified by the Romans, you just don't subscribe to the interpretation promoted by Christianity. You don't believe that he rose from the dea, that he is God/the Son of God, that his crucifixion was cosmically important, that it was signficant or unique (two others were crucified with him, the Romans crucified lots of people regularly), etc.

Oh, that's an easy one-tire-burning primates backed by us depose their former head primate, with the appropriate theatrics. It's a wonder they didn't bite off his fingers, ears and genitals, in keeping with custom. As unremarkable an episode as it was sordid, overall. Now, if the Krinakis had built a factory for turning Berbers into ashes, THAT would be quite remarkable, no? Hard to dismiss, too.

A commenter over at IOZ's place thinks that the good Monsieur is coming around to the Moldbug thesis, at least on the subject of democracy. I think he's wrong that this is a change (anarchists should hate demotism more than any system because of its proven resiliency, so there is no shift there), but I do think our host is generally in agreement with him about the nature of our foreign policy. This post seemed subtle to me, and that makes me wonder if I am projecting my opinions onto his words.

To a modern who reacts reflexively to the Nazi dog whistle, this probably reads like a defense (I had a hard time with the judge's testimony: "The camp was on wooded heights, with a wonderful view. The installations were clean and freshly painted. There were grass and flowers. The prisoners were healthy, normally fed, sun-tanned, working -"). It is not that. It is a call to consider, as you shudder at the words of these Spartans with a more Athenian sensibility than any of the decadent intellectuals of today, how posterity will look on the US' current engagement with the world. The German people had to know, you say? Thus they are monsters, and an exceptional case of irrational inhumanity towards other men? Consider that in that time, it was more clearly understood, even by civilians, that war is Hell, and the enemy will tell any lie that improves their odds of winning. That Jews were relieved of their property and put in camps because they were Jews was not a secret (that this was considered a reasonable course of action is the only thing that really surprises me, no matter how hard I try to make sense of it). This was continent wide total war. People got put in camps, and they were not resorts. Such is life in war. The industrial scale slaughter shocked and dismayed the witnesses, and I believe they were representative of most Germans. The degree of professionalism described by the judge is astounding in that setting, but one would expect nothing less of that people, and it is not an indication of the negative side of humanity, but of the positive*. Do you doubt this? Then look at the alternative, shown at the end. Ideologues with glittering eyes fighting evil the world over with righteous fury. Who are they killing now? And the American people change the channel. If they know someone in the armed forces, they think well of them from time to time, and hope they come home OK. Does the American people know what its government is doing? Probably not, but that is not because they have been kept in the dark. They have far less excuse than the Volk, both for their ignorance and their inaction.

*I have assumed that when things started to look bad for the Reich, they kicked extermination into high gear, and professionalism was not a high priority, so things got ugly real quick.

>This post seemed subtle to me, and that makes me wonder if I am projecting my opinions onto his words.

I interpreted it the same way you did. It is a demonstration that the supposed exceptionalism of the Holocaust is bogus - this is an adaptive Universalist distortion, which is particularly easy to effect because the Nazis (as Spartans) generally didn't have too much to say for themselves, making their own account of WW2 easy to ignore and bury.

Incidentally, the desire to make the Holocaust seem exceptional in comparison to communist and other leftist atrocities is probably what's behind the persecution of Holocaust denialists. It's not that the Universalists fear the denialists being taken seriously, so much as the denialists would mark out an extreme position that would allow more perspicacious revisionists to be taken seriously (look at those denialists - they are the fringe and I am a moderate!)

The Clinton video is something that, were it not for the persuasive force of the Cathedral, could easily be regarded as damning evidence of the irresponsibility and arrogance - bordering on evil - of the Universalist regime. So it is an illustration of the power of interpretation (above mere facts) in the perception of history.

>If they know someone in the armed forces, they think well of them from time to time, and hope they come home OK. Does the American people know what its government is doing?

I myself happen to have served in the armed forces and got to play in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Though there were plenty of stupid and possibly criminal fuckups, to possibly include both wars, I must have missed the parts where our Einsatzkommandos made tens of thousands of civilians dig their own graves, then shot them in the back of the head, or where we rounded up all those we didn't like and gassed them or sewed their kids together to see what would happen. In Russian, this sort of argument is called trying to stretch a condom over a basketball.

The judge is a Comrade, a member of the Party, and his testimony is accordingly bullshit, just like the testimony of Owen Lattimore and the VPOTUS talking about healthy, happy Gulag prisoners and their greenhouses full of food in 1944 was bullshit.

Your assumption about extermination being kicked into high gear when things really started to look bad is wrong. The Nazis, being no less opaquely disorganized than the Allies, would go back and forth between seeing the Jews as a labor source to be exploited and useless eaters to be exterminated ASAP, depending on what was going on at the time, who was winning their endless power squabbles, etc. Their other atrocities were just as erratic. For instance, if you were a Russian POW in 1941, odds were you'd starve to death in a barbed wire enclosure. In 1942, you might get put into Organization Todt, or go pick potatoes in France. In 1944, you might get pulled into the ROA. The Bloodlands is an excellent book examining this process (and its Soviet counterparts.)

Basically, this "debate" is about what we consider to be "proof"...What is "fun" is watching the accusations of "fiction" being bandied about from time to time.As that not so nasty man said a long time ago, "what is truth ?", and that other man, well, he had no answer to that question.It is, after all, a matter of perspective.And, while we're at it...WHAT DO THE NUMBERS PROVE ANYWAY ??Is... truth in the numbers game ?I think not.Maybe we can graduate on to looking for "it" elsewhere now ? Have we passed "go" yet ??Is gassing 6,000,000+ WORSE, or more evil than 2,000,000, for example ?Gotta be really careful when answering that question...

Our Reverend and brother, Osama bin Moldbug, has been quoted by the media condemning the Anglo-French annihilation of brother Gadhafi. Moldbug sounds pissed. Both MM and Gadhaffi must have enjoyed some damned good drugs during Gadhaffi's glory age:

America can sit down tyrants, but who will sit her down? She puts her trust in her weapons of war. She threatens the nations of the earth and has my brother calling for the assassination of brother Moammar Khadafy. What has he done? You've been deceived. That's a murderer in the White House! Who will say it? I will! Because I have a power behind me that is bringing America to judgment as we speak. Don't be afraid! I'm talking.

So, Mr. Palmer and Mr Katsaris do not agree on this one.They are not the only ones to not agree.On the one side we have.... irrationality and the other we have "common sense", in other words, thinking by numbers. (I am the last one to knock irrationality by the way... "The heart has its reasons that reason does not know." Pascal)Guess which logic the Nazis used in murdering all those people ?Guess which logic we are STILL using to determine who should have access to health care, for example ?Common sense is a double edged sword.Too little of it.. and too much of it take us down the primrose path to hell. Alongside all those good intentions.In my opinion.

> The 'wick effect' hypothesis suggests that a small external flame source, such as a burning cigarette, chars the clothing of the victim at a location, splitting the skin and releasing subcutaneous fat, which is in turn absorbed into the burned clothing, acting as a wick. This combustion can continue for as long as the fuel is available.

> Thing is, if you could completely cremate a body in a consistent manner without fuel, this would be very useful knowledge. I would be surprised that the man who figured out how to do it was a 20th c. Nazi flunky.

Well, the grim fact is he had plenty of experimental material - he needn't have been educated enough to work it out a priori. Besides, clever, inventive people appear in strange places. And flunky might be too strong a word for a man picked for a semi-covert extermination mission. If you were Hitler or some other NS high command guy, would you choose some jackoff for this job? NS high command were a little aberrant, as were Stalin, Churchill and Lincoln, but none of these were deficient in the forebrain. As I recall, Hitler himself designed and insisted on the 'feign north, then smash through the center' plan, that was such a rapid and resounding success in taking France-BeNeLux with few losses.

Aris Katsaris says “Equally so? Seriously? So I guess the remaining 5,999,999 people don't matter at all, once you've gassed one person?”

No. The remaining 5,999,999 are each that 1 person, individually.Do not kill any of them.

(Funny how modern thinking, obsessed with its left-brained quantitative fanaticism, can now fail to even understand why “Thou shalt not murder” condemns both the one-off murderer and the massacre artist.)

Let's do an example.It's reasonable to kill an SS officer to save the life of a Jew.

Is it somehow more reasonable to kill them to save the life of a Jew and 5,900,000 of their friends? The officer ends up just as dead.

I can talk about harm, but then I run into diminishing returns. Killing 6*10^6 is only going to be about 1*10^6 as harmful as killing one person.

Oddly, it turns out to be equally reasonable to kill someone to stop them from stealing a candy bar. The fundamental reason is technical, but it works out that stealing ontologically commits the thief to forfeiting the right to their own stuff, including their life. Taking someone's life without their consent is not meaningfully different from taking their candy without their consent.

This can be modified by contract, but absent such a contract, the only real reason not to shoot at shoplifters is that it isn't necessary. Violence well short of that will deter them sufficiently, and randomly killing people tends to encourage more evil, rather than deter evil.

Palmer-this is a bad way to go, because it ends up equivocating all of us with Jeffrey Dahmer. Every man has done some evil. When everyone is evil, no one is worthy of condemnation. Then we are stuck in nature red in tooth and claw-if killing and stealing a candy bar are the same, why not just kill?

Palmer, if you had said that the acts are "both" evil, I would have agreed you. But you said they're *equally* evil. That's just nonsense. Or are you now just abandoning the word "equally" but without admitting you abandoned it? Concede this own word was a fallacy and I'll agree with you.

Debra, I don't know for sure which logic the Nazis used -- but if you have evidence to prove that they believed 6 million deaths were 6 times worse than a single death, I would wish that you showed such evidence to me -- because I strongly suspect the opposite instead that in treating whole races as a unified whole, for them to "Kill The Jew" was no worse than killing one jew -- I also suspect that psychologically that's why the singular is used in similar cases (e.g. "kill whitey") -- to have people think of it as *one* sin, instead of many; and I also suspect that you're just bullshitting here for arguing about what logic the Nazis used or not, and you don't have any evidence beyond guesswork either.

"(Funny how modern thinking, obsessed with its left-brained quantitative fanaticism, can now fail to even understand why “Thou shalt not murder” condemns both the one-off murderer and the massacre artist.)"

It may be because "Thou shalt not murder" comes from a book which gloriously supported genocide in several places (e.g. Midianites, Noah's flood, etc), and thus *only* explicitily condemned one-off murders, not divinely-sanctioned genocides.

Also, it's funny how your non-modern thinking types in a digital computer while scorning numbers. If you ever fall sick, I hope you go do some qualitative voodoo magic to heal yourself, instead of going to a doctor that will use *horror of horrors!* numbers to take your temperature, or check your pulse, or prescribe some correct dosage.

Nice discussion.I presume that the scolastics were equally absorbed with finding evidence or proof. They were just looking for it in other areas.Neat how we can spend hours debating on... how many angels will fit on the head of a pin (sorry, church fathers...) or how many people were killed in WW2.The more things change, the more they stay the same.On the "kill whitey" phenomenon, I am currently living in the country that promoted the idea that killing "the king" could be achieved by killing the king, even though that neat phrase existed, and was right in front of their noses : "The King is dead, long live the King".Our ancestors didn't resort to those quotation marks the way we now do.I believe that Hitler, for personal and social reasons, wanted to kill... "the Jew".Monotheism and the logos have been eating away at us for a while now. The triumph of the logos. (the numbers, the ABSTRACT numbers...)And when Spinoza got around to secularizing the Judaic belief system, he got the ball rolling to secularize the Christian belief system too.But secularizing our religious traditions has not kicked them out the door. It has only made our ideologies ever more ABSTRACT and disincarnated, making it possible to carry out ever more eugenic programs, like killing.. "the Jew(s)".WHO WILL IT BE NEXT TIME ??

Dear Sir, the comment "The Nazis are the Spartans" is pure balderdash! What a sick comment with no justification.

"Nazi" is an acronym standing for National SOCIALIST Workers Party. The Nazi party was egalitarian! If the Spartans ran a caste system and had a King and Aristocracy, How in the blazes hell are the "Spartans"?

If you read Socrates and Plutarch, they both said, the Intellectual life is what Spartans strive more than for physical excercise. The home of Greek Philosophy is the Spartans.

If you read Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, you will find that the National Socialists were DEMOCRATS! They were followers of the French Revolution! The party platform developed in the 1919s in Bohemia, by German Austrians called themselves "LIBERALS".

All Socialists are Idealists! The Spartans were not liberals, idealists, or egalitarians.

Your statement is off the wall and it shows that you are historically illiterate on many fronts.

Well, the grim fact is he had plenty of experimental material - he needn't have been educated enough to work it out a priori.

Anyone with enough funds can have all the experimental material he needs in the form of pig corpses. And its worth funding because anytime there is a natural distaster there is a pile of corpses that needs to be disposed of in a sanitary fashion.

Mr. Palmer, if we have all done evil, we all require condemnation...Perhaps you would like to go into details about how we should be condemned, to what extent, by whom, etc etc., the punishment and the possibility of MITIGATING CIRCUMSTANCES (even the courts STILL allow for mitigating circumstances.. FOR THE TIME BEING, at least..)The devil is in the details, remember...

Easy: imagine pitching a project aimed at rediscovering a lost Nazi corpse-burning technique. Do you really think anybody's going to fund it? It just sounds terrible. Maybe it'd do a lot of good and be a boon for all mankind, but good luck getting anybody with money or authority to associate his name with it.

Then your model basically consists of "everybody sucks, every society sucks, there's no way to discern between them because they're all bad." While this might be a very emotionally satisfying stance, it doesn't do much in terms of letting the user assess the societies of the past, present and presumable future. In short, it's a very Eeyore position to take.

"Nazi" is an acronym standing for National SOCIALIST Workers Party. The Nazi party was egalitarian! If the Spartans ran a caste system and had a King and Aristocracy, How in the blazes hell are the "Spartans"?

In fact, the Spartans were as egalitarian as the Nazis wanted to be. All Spartans were equal in the community and had the same obligations, no matter how rich you were or how particularly illustrious your lineage. (Licurgus's law took care of that). They had a King - Germany had a Führer - and they had an aristocracy - and Germany had the S.S., which was intended to become one.

And yes, the Spartans ran a caste system: Spartans on top, Messianians below as slaves. Guess what was Hitler's plan for Eastern Europe? (Shorthand: kill most of the Slavs to reduce their numbers to something manageable, then keep the rest as slaves. Hitler said that the Ukrainians would need to be taught only enough reading to understand street signs...).

On the mechanics of burning bodies, there are a number of issues involved:-

- A frying pan fire works by having a large surface area at the smoke point temperature, so that a large burning zone above it can feed heat down onto all of it from a large solid angle. Like a network externality, each burning point is sustained by vapour generated by the other burning points, so it doesn't work for a single drop of fuel (but a wick produces the effect for small amounts, by surrounding a small drop with a small burning zone with a large solid angle).

- So, with a large burning zone, the wick effect is not necessary for burning bodies (and, after all, the clothes were salvaged). However, it is necessary to get the fire started in the first place. (The description should have read, there is no continued need for other fuel - but kindling was necessary.)

- The book Treblinka describes how an outside consultant actually showed the guards how to manage it (my guess is, he had expertise dealing with "fallen stock", farm animals that die in the wrong places). The crematorium consisted of a number of iron rails, supported about waist high on concrete blocks and two or three feet apart, in the open. Workers draped bodies over these, most inflammable first and lowest, according to the rankings the consultant had given: children/old/mature; women/men; fat/thin (I don't recall which criteria were stronger than others).

- Petrol soaked rags were used to start the burning, after which molten grease dripped down and sustained the burning until it was effectively all done.

Although the apparatus was simple and cheap to build and operate, you can see that using this system required expertise in placing the bodies quickly and at the right levels - but the disposal workers had a high attrition rate themselves, from the stress.

Good job, Wheeler.It seems to me that a significant number of people have some rather outlandish prejudices about our feudal heritage...(AND about slavery too, while we're at it. Egalitarian propaganda oblige, as we say.)They LOVE to bandy that "serf" word around a lot, while not really having a handle on what it comprised in the feudal system.Maybe because our egalitarian obsession has made everything.. EQUAL in our own eyes ?Like in "fair is foul and foul is fair" ?Troubled times, troubled times..Unless "it" has always been that way ?We read through Aristophanes' "The Assembly of Women" in my theater group two weeks ago, and it really sounded frighteningly familiar to my ears...

that's a matter of terminology. Who knows what system would be exactly be imposed on the East if Germany had won? We can only guess based on the Nazis's stated intentions, which were not necessarily possible even for them. So I wouldn't put much stress on the slave/serf division.

The post you linked to is informative but a bit ridiculous. "Happy Helots?" I see why Epaminondas had such difficulty in ressurrecting Messenia after Leuctra (/sarcasm). And the author said he was "astonished" to learn that the theory of how a society works does not necessarily match the reality. Duh!

All in all, I think the Sparta/Nazi Germany comparison holds well enough.

Sparta is quintessential Hyper Europeanism. Have you looked at Christendom? With its feudalism?

What is similar to Sparta is Christendom! Kings, Aristocracy, priestly class, caste system!

Sparta is also the home of Greek philosophy. Christianity is a product of Hellenism (q.v. Jerry Dell Ehrlich, Plato's Gift to Christianity) which in turn was produced by Plato in which Plato was a disciple, emulator and admirer of Spartan Culture.

Philosophy, Greek philosophy, is the handmaiden of Christian theology. So Sparta is akin to Christendom.

National Socialism was a reaction to International Socialism. International Socialism, i.e. commiunism, Marxism, Bolshevism, is a genocidal ideology. International socialism, cooked up by Karl Marx, is about destroying nations and races. In that case it is genocidal. Nazism was a reaction against the genocidalness of International Socialism. None of this comes from Sparta who never committed any genocide.

Every ancient racial group, the Persians, the Assyrians, the Hebrews, the Carthaginians, the Romans and the Athenians, all committed genocide. Sparta is the only ancient civilization that never committed one.

Sparta is the root of European civilization. Attack her and you are attacking Standard European culture.

alat is completely right. stop getting your history from paranoid-schizophrenics stored in the very last row of the amazon depot.

spartan society was based on the principle of the military collective. they were vastly egalitarian -- the most so of any society in the ancient world, known to themselves as "hoi homoioi": the equals.

the elements of social solidarity were equal allotments of land, known as "kleroi"; the first hoplite franchise (a full-city assembly underneath a council of aristocratic elders and topped by an ephoric executive); and most important, the helots -- state-owned labor (yes, not quite slaves, as they constituted entire captive, subjugated populations, mainly laconians and messenians).

for my 2: people in general horribly overstate the difference between athens and sparta. athens was not an oligarcy, true -- but, unlike sparta and its league -- was actually the locus of what was in fact a brutal fascist empire. double fact: it was their direct democracy at home that prevented them from forming the necessary bureaucracy to administer and prolong such an empire

A long time ago, I found in a second-hand bookstore, the obscure two-volume work "Sensism: the philosophy of the West" by Charles Smith. Someone once described it as a cross between analytic philosophy and "Mein Kampf", but that's just an overreaction to the mere presence, in the book, of a belief in white racial superiority (of the "old-fashioned" anti-Semitic type, not this newfangled Steve-Sailer-ism that believes in Jewish and East Asian cognitive superiority). There's hardly a word in the book about war, and no appeal to the emotions at all; the author was clearly a philosophy and history nerd. Half of it is about epistemology and Lucretius-style atomism. In fact, Smith was criticized by Revilo P. Oliver (look him up if you haven't heard of him) for stupidly sticking to his own philosophical neologisms rather than writing prose that people could understand. But Smith evidently believed that it was best to write precisely and without using words that have been tarnished, even if that meant that he had to invent new ones.

Anyway, the book actually says "NOT COPYRIGHT", so a long time ago I scanned it and corrected the scan, with the intent of getting it uploaded at Project Gutenberg. Unfortunately, after a delay, I was unable to reestablish contact with the guy in charge of uploads, so the file has languished for a long time on my USB.

But a conversation today with a believer in "push-gravity" (an old theory that gravitational pull is caused by the push from a flux of particles) reminded me of the book's existence, and suddenly I knew where it might find an audience. So here it is:

http://www.2shared.com/file/jVkWZFL8/SENSISM.html

I must warn blood-and-iron enthusiasts that this is not like Yockey's "Imperium". Basically, it's the philosophical masterpiece of a crank, in which he spells out the principles of "sensist samist trialism". The warnings against race-mixing communism only come at the very beginning and the very end.

On the Holocaust. Ask yourself this question: Why were Freemasons jailed alongside Jews? Were they not Germans? Full-bloodied Germans?

Did you know that Hitler wrote a second book and gives the reason for the Holocaust there?

It had nothing to do with race. Why were the Freemasons jailed and executed along with the Jews. Answer that question and you know why the killing did NOT start until after the war started!

Again, Communism is all about the Hegelian dialectic! If you understand this twisted logic, you would know that communism would produce a bastard child! The Hegelian Dialectic states as much.

The Holocaust and the rise of national socialism had zippo, zero, nada to do with Sparta. But everything to do with Communism and the Hegelian dialectic and the similarity between communism and Freemasonry.

Death maiden, you are materially in error in your description of the elements of Spartan social solidarity. As with practically all viable societies, it required the participation of a middle class to work, here the perioeci or "dwellers around" (some societies achieve the effect with age stratification or some other method rather than a middle class).

Basically, Alrenous you too are materially wrong, but about something else than Death maiden was:-

- "materially" is not just emphasis;

- it does not emphasise material evidence; and

- it has nothing to do with "logical evidence" (which is meaningless, unless you are misstating "logical argument").

A material error is one which makes a material - as opposed to trivial - difference, unlike, say, a quibble; it is an error which matters.

Death maiden's error was material because she left out something very important that happens - in some variant form or another - in all viable societies.

Your error is material because you, and the people you mislead, will go around blithely ignorant of material errors you make since you are unaware of such things. In particular, if you persist in taking "materially" for mere emphasis, you will be led astray in a similar way to the fellow who thinks "literally" is mere emphasis and sincerely does not see anything wrong in describing an angry person as "he literally exploded".

So if you, P.M. Lawrence, say 'you're in error' without putting 'material' there, you mean, "Hey, you're wrong but it doesn't matter." So, a waste of time?

Are you in the habit of wasting your time?

Unlike 'literal' adding 'material' doesn't change the meaning of the sentence at all. To verify: take it out and see what happens.

"He exploded." -> Was very angry.

"He literally exploded." -> Meat chunks everywhere.

"He was in error." -> Factually incorrect.

"He was materially in error." -> Factually incorrect. No! Really it's important this time you guys!

It's a property of arguments in general. Either they're sound or they're not. The error can be subtle or egregious, but the argument is broken either way.

Evidence can't be meaningfully distinguished from argument. To go from evidence to conclusion requires reason, hence, inference, hence, argument. (Aside: this is the reason the rationalist/empiricist divide is fundamentally retarded and has been dropped in practice.)

Similarly, that an argument can be constructed is evidence for its conclusion. Since, if the argument is sound its conclusion is true, it is evidence of strength proportional to how probable it is that the argument is sound, given what you already know.

In fact, it does emphasize material evidence, though I'm not surprised you didn't realize it. It's a connotation, and ~everyone responds to connotations, even if few consciously appreciate them.

So.... I wrote elsewhere that most of us sound like lawyers in our society these days.Haggling over CONTRACTS, as though doing business (and the rest...) were NECESSARILY an affair of CONTRACTS.This goes WAY back...But it is not particularly JOYFUL.In fact, I find that reducing the world to a system of contracts makes the world AND US particularly JOYLESS.

On the Holocaust. Ask yourself this question: Why were Freemasons jailed alongside Jews? Were they not Germans? Full-bloodied Germans?

----------------

Probably for the exact opposite reason why many german/european jews ended up fighting in the wehrmacht, or in some cases even in the SS, basically surviving that period due to an act of devotion to the state. I can understand why Hitler and the Nazi's had a BIG problem with synarchistic internationalists. If I were to boil this down to the Hegelian Dialectice we would be looking at a dog fight between Internationalist vs. Nationalists. So what is the synthesis... the EU???

I think some interesting background can be found in several books involving the period. Bloodlands was mentioned earlier, I haven't read it but I am familiar with the material. A Taste of War by Lizzie Collingham is another, a good primer on food/nutrition during that period, it details restrictions in diet involving various belligerents. And last but not least would be Chuchill's Secret War by Madhursee Mukerjee.

If anybody could pick a year in which peak genocide took place it would be 1943. While the germans were liquidating untermenschen in eastern europe the British had no problems starving to death millions of Indians at the same time. It would be the same year that both Australia and Canada made their respective wheatboards mandatory in regards to marketing. I would posit that as complicated double legged bacteria we have a bad habit of doing some rather nasty things when the petri dish runs out of room, and then explaining it away as some sort of ideological abberation.

Historian Norman Davies has caught a a lot of flak over the years (including being denied tenure at Stanford)for writing too much about Soviet atrocities during WWII. Here's an audio interview with him:http://www.blogtalkradio.com/the_right_perspective/2009/05/31/the-right-perspective

Maybe you should read some of the more interesting accounts of Spartan Females.

Rabid and totally out of control.

In the end, Sparta openly betrayed the wrong city-state and Thebes wrecked them.

Several ancient writers give figures for one or both of the armies but unfortunately they are contradictory and in some cases unbelievable.[7] Modern Scholars estimates have varied from 6,000 to 9,000 for the Boeotian force.[8] For the Spartan side most modern scholars favor Plutarch's figure of 10,000 in infantry and 1,000 cavalry.[8]

With inferior numbers cause the Spartans, when not betraying like they did the Athenians at Marathon, or or selling out all of Greece to a foreign power, or beating on much smaller powers, or other antics, were really lousy fighters.

But what, what about Sparta Glory?When Philip created the league of the Greeks on the pretext of unifying Greece against Persia, the Spartans chose not to join—they had no interest in joining a pan-Greek expedition if it was not under Spartan leadership. Thus, upon the conquest of Persia, Alexander the Great sent to Athens 300 suits of Persian armour with the following inscription "Alexander, son of Philip, and all the Greeks except the Spartans, give these offerings taken from the foreigners who live in Asia [emphasis added]".

Of course they have a story about how they refused to send a real force to block the Persian Invasion, and let the Persians through, but they claim the tiny force fought to the lost, and they claim their king died there.

spartan society was based on the principle of the military collective. they were vastly egalitarian -- the most so of any society in the ancient world, known to themselves as "hoi homoioi": the equals.

There is much to be said for Speer's memoir, though it is not without its disingenuous moments, but the problem with it is that we never get to meet the Nazi Speer - the author, by the time he writes, has completely submitted (with or without internal reservation) to conquering liberalism. So what we read in Speer is a liberal perspective on the Third Reich. We can get this from many other places, even as a primary source, for despite the hard work of Judge Freisler our record is not short of July 20 memoirs - nor was Nazi Germany short of secret liberals. Indeed the Third Reich we know from secondary sources is largely rendered through their eyes.

There's no mystery about how Nazi Germans viewed Hitler's Reich 3.0. The Nazi German's vision of themselves was the same as how Penn State fans viewed themselves in Joe Paterno's Penn State.

Adolf Hitler was nothing more than the German Joe Paterno.

Hitler's Germans functioned exactly like any other members of a top heavy (and I emphasize the word "Heavy", Hitler's yoke and burden was not light) governing bureaucracy.

You wouldn't think it possible that Godwin's Law could be demonstrated in a thread that started out putting Universalism in the same ballpark of depravity as National Socialism, but UJ just blew our minds.

You wouldn't think it possible that Godwin's Law could be demonstrated in a thread that started out putting Universalism in the same ballpark of depravity as National Socialism,

How'd I violate Godwin's Law?

All I did was answer Moldbug's question regarding how Reich 3.0 was viewed by ordinary Nazis.

I pointed out Hitler's Germany operated more or less the same way Paterno's Penn State did, i.e., with most of the apparatchiks somewhat aware unsavory activities were occurring in their Sovereign structure, but with few really desiring to look to closely into the locker room showers at night for fear of seeing too much sensual lubrication going on.

In the case of Penn State ordinary party stake holder functionaries kept the Sovereign apparatus up and running with their day to day activities and tried their best to look the other way whenever they heard a defensive coordinator making strange grunting noises in the shower.

Penn State, perhaps even more than Nazi Germany, is how 21st century governance operates without burdening itself with too much guilt.

The analogy breaks down when you consider the ends. One was good and the other was just sexual perversion.

Actually, the German Joe Paterno was only getting started with the Holocaust.

After the Jews had been polished off, Adolf's next move was going to be to liquidate 100 or so million Slavs, or, to put the numbers a different way, about 15-20% of the world's European population.

The Holocaust (and other engagements like the German starvation-genocide of Leningrad) was, in a certain sense, a practice run for the even larger annihilation/enslavement/expulsion of Eastern Europe's Slavs much as Sandusky's pedophile tenure at Penn State was just a warmup for the the main course: a boy pimping "charity" called "Second Mile" which Sandusky used to serve well to do child rapists.

You don't violate Godwin's Law, it's not a statute. It's like Newton's laws. Big 10 football game = Nuremberg rally? And I suppose all these riot police "beating" OWS types are the Gestapo. Wait, what? I'm so confused.

You know, I am wiping my sweaty forehead right now, after trying to get a glimmer of the REASONING behind the last comments..Why is it that the greatest problem with analogy seems to be how IT MAKES SO MANY THINGS EQUIVALENT that at the end, foul is fair, and fair is foul ??...., and the world becomes SO CONFUSING that it is no longer possible to think straight ?

Hello again "America is Athens" tards. Since you had such good manners as to refuse to address my complete rejection of your position, I guess I'm just going to have to call you typical cowardly Americans. Just like the Spartans.

And oh yes, the Spartans were beyond cowardly. Sure, sure, against a grossly inferior opponent, like Libya, they would strike without mercy, howling wildly. And slaves. Must not forget the "war" against their unarmed slave population.

I suggest you actually read about Sparta before babbling like a fool about how America is "Athens" and not "Sparta".

For example, the part where Sparta sells out all of Greece to the Persians might clue you in a little.

Of course, "the other Greeks weren't Spartans". Right? Got that Elan going, don't you? Such fine discussions are very key when wants to be a cowardly traitor.

Remember Marathon? The Spartans would have liked to honor their treaty, but they had a religious festival! So I guess they'll just have to giggle and point while the Athenians are crushed by the Persians.

Maybe you should read some of the more interesting accounts of Spartan Females.

Rabid and totally out of control.

In the end, Sparta openly betrayed the wrong city-state and Thebes wrecked them.

Several ancient writers give figures for one or both of the armies but unfortunately they are contradictory and in some cases unbelievable.[7] Modern Scholars estimates have varied from 6,000 to 9,000 for the Boeotian force.[8] For the Spartan side most modern scholars favor Plutarch's figure of 10,000 in infantry and 1,000 cavalry.[8]

With inferior numbers cause the Spartans, when not betraying like they did the Athenians at Marathon, or or selling out all of Greece to a foreign power, or beating on much smaller powers, or other antics, were really lousy fighters.

But what, what about Sparta Glory?

When Philip created the league of the Greeks on the pretext of unifying Greece against Persia, the Spartans chose not to join—they had no interest in joining a pan-Greek expedition if it was not under Spartan leadership. Thus, upon the conquest of Persia, Alexander the Great sent to Athens 300 suits of Persian armour with the following inscription "Alexander, son of Philip, and all the Greeks except the Spartans, give these offerings taken from the foreigners who live in Asia [emphasis added]".

Of course they have a story about how they refused to send a real force to block the Persian Invasion, and let the Persians through, but they claim the tiny force fought to the last, and they claim their king died there.

I have to believe them because they are treacherous scum.

Just another behind the back sweet-heart deal with their Persian buddies?

Excerpt from the Allied newsreel "Welt im Film" (No. 137), broadcasted on January 8th, 1948. The Allied newsreel refers to the investigations of the Polish court and declares that less than 300,000 people died at Auschwitz:

Hello again "America is Athens" tards. Since you had such good manners as to refuse to address my complete rejection of your position, I guess I'm just going to have to call you typical cowardly Americans.

I apologize, but Americans have limited knowledge of European history prior to 1939.

Of course, Moldbug with his 160++ IQ is also blissfully and utterly ignorant of the history of pre-Hitler Europe. And Moldbug can't use low IQ as an excuse like my other fellow Americans can.

I keep asking Moldbug to read about European history BEFORE the Industrial Revolution, but can't quite seem to move his gaze further back than Carlyle. He's too caught up with the shiny explosions of the 1939-1945 period.

Mr. Barnum,We know what to expect with victors' history, and the Spartans definitely had more influence over the way it got told than many. So I don't find your characterization of the real story too shocking. But that said, Alexander the Great did not conquer them. Was he a punk bitch too? It looks to me like they knew something about war fighting, though they were a little less noble than is portrayed by popular history. On a side note, if you really want to engage in discussion, why don't you ease up on the derision and condescension, and offer a reading recommendation instead of cutting and pasting from la Wik.

UJ, Thanks, but I think the question mark stays until PSU attempts to achieve sovereignty outside the gridiron. Maybe I'd consider dropping it if they (or anyone in the Big 10) had a prayer of achieving even that much, since everyone loves a winner, and if they suddenly took over college football alumni boosters might start thinking NAMBLA is on to something. But keep up the good work. Anti-semitism has a fighting chance as long as you keep running your mouth. Your mixture of hero worship and resentment towards our host is very amusing also. Why don't you teach us more? You have demonstrated that you have no problem pontificating off topic.

"The camps that were captured by United States forces in 1945 and figured in the magazines and newsreels of the late 1940s and 1950s, i.e. Dachau and Buchenwald, did not really play a role in the "extermination" of Jews at all according to any serious historical works, either pro or against the Holocaust story.

The only reason why Jews were found in those camps at all is that they were evacuated back to Germany from camps further east; some had been brought all the way from Riga. And although the piles of bodies shown in the magazines and newsreels were very impressive, and convinced young gulpers all over America that something very bad had been done to the Jews there, they were not really the result of an extermination program per se, but rather of the starvation, disease and exhaustion engendered by the aimless and chaotic movement of the prisoners from place to place.

Quite often the bodies in the piles seen at Dachau for instance were not of persons designated for "extermination," but rather of long-term concentration camp prisoners who died as a result of the chaos caused by flooding the German camps with prisoners evacuated from the east Reichwards.

As for the so-called Dachau massacre fictionalised in Shutter Island, the American chimpout over hurt feelings failed to take into account that many of the guards at Dachau, when it was captured by US forces, had recently been transferred from the Luftwaffe and miscalculated the condign punishment. It was the result of PWD personnel setting up the camps for atrocity tours for regular soldiers, so they'd have a good horror story to send back home in support of the Good War--who'd disagree with someone who was there?"

"In the autumn of 1944, all members of concentration camp guard units at Dachau fit for frontline service had been sent to the front. They had been replaced by surplus personnel from other formations, in particular the Luftwaffe, who were no longer fit for active service at the front; these men had been transferred to the Waffen-SS for the purpose of serving as camp guards.

It should be noted that the above exchange of personnel between the front and the concentration camps only affected the camp guard companies. It did not affect the actual camp administrative staff, i.e. those who ran the camp and were in direct control of the prisoners, who largely remained in place throughout the war. Upon imminent surrender, however, some of the actual camp staff seem to have fled, leaving the guard companies to keep the prisoners from escaping, and some of the stay-behinds were protected by the Allies for their future witch trials.

The persons most responsible for any atrocities against inmates were the German camp administration staff. They had direct supervision of, and contact with, the prisoners, and were in a position to potentially inflict brutality on them on a daily basis. They tended to remain in the camps, and were generally not rotated to and from the front or other duties.

The guard detachments, which comprised the majority of the men who served at concentration camps, have to be distinguished from the camp administration staff. The function of the men of the concentration camp guard companies was to maintain perimeter security, and also to provide cordons around prisoners on work details and in transit from one place to another. They often were not allowed to enter the camp itself; they did not normally come into close contact with the prisoners. Unlike the camp administration staff, members of the guard detachments were routinely rotated between guard duty at the camps and frontline duty (which is the reason why the great majority of persons who served at concentration camps belonged to the guard detachments). They also shot prisoners trying to escape; sometimes those attempts to esacape were genuine, sometimes not.

There were of course some cases of members of the guard companies shooting prisoners in alleged escape attempts. In some cases, they were put-up jobs, with the guard shooting a prisoner at random in order to get the benefits accruing to guards who prevented escape attempts; those acts would certainly be criminal, but it's fairly typical wartime business. Allegations of this sort seem to cluster mid-war, though.

But in other cases, they were genuine escape attempts, or more probably cases of despairing prisoners committing suicide by hastily approaching the wire so as to be shot. In those cases, the guard who shot is no more criminal than a prison guard in, say, a United States prison, who shoots an escaping white prisoner who had been sent to prison by a corrupt court.

Still, the men of the guard companies did not supervise the prisoners, and did not force them to work so hard that they collapsed with exhaustion and died as per the usual sob stories. That was the function of the German camp administrative staff, who exercised their authority through the Kapos on the work details and through the camp and block seniors within the camp itself."

"The Kapos were prisoners who worked inside concentration camps and were seconded to lower administrative positions therein. The etymological origin is unknown; it could be Kameradschaftspolizei, or the Italian word for head (capo), or just a further contraction of Kazett-Polizei (Kazett being itself a longhand of KZ which is a shorthand of Konzentrationslager). They were usually tough guys whom no one wanted to grieve or contradict. Some of them were, per the prisoner demographics demanding it, Poles.

The bottom line is that members of the guard companies, who comprised by far the bulk of the personnel who served at concentration camps, bear overall far less responsibility for any indecent treatment of the prisoners.

In the case of Dachau there was an added dimension, in that there was a Waffen-SS base immediately adjacent to the camp but not connected with it. That base contained large numbers of SS-men, including many in hospital. Those persons had not been inside the concentration camp, and had not been in a position to participate in atrocities against the prisoners inside the camp.

One of the main things that had enraged the US soldiers who captured the camp was the discovery of a trainful of corpses of prisoners transferred to Dachau who had died in transit from hunger and exposure. It is doubtful whether the Dachau camp staff or guards could have reasonably been held responsible for those deaths, since most of them occurred before the arrival of the train at Dachau.

They were also told some lurid stories about a mythical Dachau gas chamber, or in more confused terminology "gas ovens," which, despite falling into disrepute as far as history books go, one can still go to jail for if denying it in Germany unless sniping at it from an academic ivory tower. There, historians, but not the hoi polloi, are firewalled by law; unless you piss off jews and get your degree disavowed (yes, they can do that, woe to the German strivers!) along with, retroactively, your protection.

As the propaganda mandated that anybody in SS uniform was fair game for summary retribution and the ones administratively responsible were off-limits, someone else bore the immediate brunt, even if it meant dragging SS men out of the adjacent hospital for execution. Of course, what's done is history, c'est la guerre, and there's no need for permanent "firsthand knowledge of evil" introspection as in Shutter Island especially if it inflicts self-harm in any way.

Speaking of, there were even some Red Army soldiers who, incited by the lovely Il'ia Erenburg of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to let no German escape their rage, to 'kill the little Fritzes' and rape their schoolgirls, 'too,' had second thoughts after the deeds were done. When some cleared their heads and publicly wondered what the fuck made them behave this way, they were promptly sent to the GULag for exhibiting bourgeois compassion towards the enemy."

re: "Anonymous said...Denying the Holocaust is like denying or not believing in Christianity. "

It must have been about 1976 or 1977. My wife and I took a young Ph.D. ( History ) professor to dinner. I had read a book of his and wrote to him and then arranged to meet him hence the dinner together.

During the long conversation that we had I can recall only one point that he made and that one was just an off hand comment.He mentioned that "everyone" [ Ph.D. historians I surmised. ] knew that the Holocaust was nonsense and merely a mechanism to extract money from Germany forever as well as providing propaganda to continue Jewish occupation of Palestine.

I kick myself for not pursuing the topic with him. I did not maintain an acquaintance with him so It would be hard to write and ask him about it now given the status of one being labeled a "denier" in academia.

Maybe there would be less hatred for your Semitic roots if you people would stop moving into other people's countries? You people are always complaining about anti-Semtism and yet you people never leave. In fact, even today, Germany still has a relatively large Jewish population which is strange when you consider that the Germans supposedly killed six million of you people. Why would you people want to live in a country that killed six million of your own kind? Is it a death wish or is the Holocaust just Semitic propaganda?